David K. Leff, Essayist, Poet, Lecturer

A Garden of Fire Hydrants

A fire hydrant without water may seem a contradiction, but there’s one in front of the Collinsville, Connecticut fire station where I served for 26 years.  It has no piping and it’s not connected to any supply source.  Rather than putting out fires, it stands as an emblem of the fire service, proudly reminding us of a critical tool used to save lives and property.  It illustrates the importance of hydrants, not just as practical instruments of firefighting technology, but as symbols of all that is good in fighting fire.

I recently discovered what can only be described as a garden of fire hydrants at the Watch Hill Fire Department in Rhode Island.  Surrounding a couple picnic tables and gathered along the outside wall of the station were well over a hundred fire hydrants in every imaginable color from shades of the more common yellows, reds, and greens, to violet, orange, pink, and gold.  There was even a hydrant painted like a Dalmatian.   Some had both large steamer valves as well as smaller spuds, others with just spuds alone.  The barrels were rounded, squared or faceted, the caps domed or a bit flattened, plain or fluted.  The spot was as colorful and beautiful as a plot of flowers.

Stepping Into Boggy Mysteries

Imagine stepping into a world of eternal twilight and deep silence where the earth is not quite firm and carnivorous plants lurk on iridescent green ground.  It’s as if you’ve entered a zone beyond recorded time.  Such a place is not far.  Welcome to Black Spruce Bog in Cornwall’s Mohawk State Forest.

More common to our north in colder areas, bogs are rare in Connecticut, found mostly in the state’s northwest.  Acidic wetlands with precipitation the sole source of water, bogs are nutrient poor and dominated by sphagnum mosses that accumulate as peat rather than decompose.  Able to hold water fifteen to twenty times its weight, peat moss is used as a soil amendment by gardeners, the closest most of us get to a bog.  Often called “quaking” bogs, a mat of vegetation generally grows over water, causing surface undulations when stepped upon, like a waterbed.

Wild Caboose Chases

On the Caboose Trail
Last car on a train, the caboose is first in our hearts.  Long after their life as rolling stock is over, many remain part of our landscape, repurposed for other uses.  Sometimes near the stations they once served, but often far from the tracks, they’ve been reborn as retail stores, snack shops, information kiosks, restaurants, and storage units.  Plenty can be seen at railroad museums along with various freight and passenger cars, but no other railcar comes close to the caboose in finding new and useful functions beyond museum gates.

Without much of a plan or idea of where it would lead, I’ve spent the past year on a series of what my wife Mary affectionately calls “wild caboose chases.”  I didn’t want to find every reused caboose near my home in Connecticut; just enough to satiate my curiosity and see the variety of stationary roles that these structures designed for movement now serve.  Tied tightly to the mythology and romance of the rails, seeing cabooses seemed to make people happy.  What was their magic?